Campaign Journal: The Arena

…And then I was having dinner at an inn with Morwain, Freyaria and Jay. Not sure how that happened, as I’m sure Freya and I died to those snakes, but there we were, with not a scratch on us. This Jay character is clearly significantly more powerful than he’s been letting on. He didn’t resurrect us for no reason though: he needs me to investigate Zincher. Find these purple death crystals.

Of course, Zincher was not at all pleased that we didn’t bring the mage back alive. I don’t think my story about killing him accidentally as he tried to escape went over too well. He killed Jek, his second best gladiator, just to make a point. Reminding me for the hundredth time how much he had to pay to save me from the Bloodworks. Ugh.

Unsurprisingly, we’ve been sent to the gladiatorial pits for a ‘special’ fight. Hopefully Freya and I aren’t the ones who end up dead this time.

Aaand the special fight turned out to be a massive tournament, to the death. Clearly I must have pissed Zincher off more than I thought. Zeb came to warn us, but he didn’t really have much information for us. As usual. I don’t know why Zincher even keeps that useless bandit around.

Listening to the other fights was pretty intimidating for the others, but of course they’d never been in the gladiator pits. Someone unleashed a bear in one of the fights. No doubt we would have to put on a pretty good show, and also not die in the process.

In our first fight, we got given the name ‘Zincher’s Favoured’ – ugh – but we soon earned a new nickname. Our opponent was Grek, the big Shoanti who liked to swing around a massive earth breaker. He managed to smack me with that thing so hard I was seeing stars. I reckoned my best bet was to grab him and limit his ability to put in another big hit like that. If he managed to hit me again, or hit one of the others… well, I don’t think we would have been victorious if that had been the case. Anyway, he never got another chance to raise that weapon. After I grappled Grek, the rat-man managed to toss an acid bomb into Grek’s mouth, blowing his head right off. I was covered in brain and bone and other gore I didn’t care to look at too closely.

The crowd loved it, even though Whiskers didn’t seem to know what was going on. I lifted him up on my shoulder so they could cheer for him some more. Maybe he would be more useful than I had thought. There was this big fat dwarf staring down from Zincher’s box – I only noticed him because he was glaring at us even more angrily than Zincher was. But I really didn’t have time to worry about Zincher’s friends – not with our next fight coming up.

Next up was the bear we’d heard earlier. We were given a new nickname, the Head Crushers, and we lived up to that by destroying the poor creature in a matter of seconds (I think the witch put it to sleep, though I had told her to keep her powers hidden until necessary, so I’m not exactly sure). The crowd went wild, but there was something wrong. Zincher looked livid – not a good sign. Something told me that we should already have been dead by now. I had a bad feeling about the next fight.

It was the big finale. We were up against the monster Kroxar. I say monster, but ‘cannibal’ is probably a better word. Certainly he had quite the reputation. He made his first mistake by glancing at the two rogues sneaking up behind Morwain and Whiskers, giving me enough time to shout a warning. The witch threw some sort of glittery powder onto the sneaks, which seemed to blind them. She then let out a horrific scream that somehow only affected one of the rogues. After that, the fight was pretty short. I got to kick Kroxar in the privates before taking him down, while Whiskers and Freya finished off the rogues.

Things moved pretty quickly after that. We had won the tournament, but Zeb came to see us again with a ridiculous message: someone had paid my debt to Zincher, freeing me. He suggested we get outta there before Zincher had me killed. I had everything I valued on my person, so we left hastily and went to the inn where we last saw Jay. Somehow he was already waiting for us with a feast.

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About Me

My name is Abigail, and I'm a gamer, geek and LEGO fanatic. Here on the Triangular Room, I blog about the Pathfinder roleplaying game, board gaming, LEGO and The Sims. If one of these topics interests you, you've come to the right place!